Abstract: On the background of the current “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” and Intellectual Property Rights (IPRS) strategy, this paper focuses on innovation firms to analyze the effect of provincial IPRs on employment of China’s innovation firms by using the firm-level data from 2002 to 2007. The results show that: (1) In general, IPRs have positive influence on the firms’ net growth of employment. (2) IPRs have a stronger positive effect on young-innovation firms than that on mature-innovation firms in sustained innovative firms’ samples because of their “improving job creation”. (3) Alleviating external financing constraints and innovation are two channels for IRPs to affect employment of innovation firms. Moreover, the effect of alleviating external financing constrains on the employment of young sustained innovation firms is bigger than that of sustained innovation mature firms. However, innovation has little significant effect on both two types of firms.
